Earlier this week, GGV Capital’s Jeff Richards and Hans Tung joined TechCrunch for an Extra Crunch Live session. During our hour-long chat, we touched on startup profitability, the global venture capital scene, why GGV doesn’t have an office in Europe, how the venture industry is responding to its stark lack of diversity and other issues.

When it comes to useful bits of information, this was perhaps the most useful Extra Crunch Live discussion in which I’ve participated. One moment that stood out came early in the chat when we were talking about COVID-19-driven headwinds and tailwinds and how many startups might be in trouble. Richards said the following (emphasis via TechCrunch):

“You know, the one thing that’s been remarkable for me — I was in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur in the ’99, 2000 dot-com bubble, and 9/11. I was here in ’08, ’09 — I think there is a level of resiliency in Silicon Valley that we did not have 10 years ago and 20 years ago. I don’t have data to point to that. But we have been saying now for a few months that we’ve been blown away at the level of maturity, calmness, perseverance [and] resiliency that our companies and the founders and management teams have. On an emotional level, it’s been very heartwarming, because you hope to back the kind of people that are building real companies that can withstand challenges.

I think the corollary to that is you’ve seen companies that raised a ton of money and were burning a ton of cash and weren’t building very good businesses, a lot of those frankly went under in Q1 or are going under now. They haven’t been able to raise more cash and they’re just kind of dead.”

Both Richards and Tung were positive about their own portfolio companies’ recent performance and financial health (cash position, really). But it appears that not only are their portfolios doing well, but other startups are a bit more solid than in previous downturns.

On the flip side, however, there is a separate cohort of startups that were running inefficiently before and are now perhaps unfundable. Reading both points in unison, it appears that the startup market is bifurcating between the companies that will come out of the COVID-19 era unwounded, and those that are suffering. And the companies that weren’t the most cash hungry probably have the highest chance of being in the first bucket.

There’s a lot more to get to. So hit the jump for the full video and audio, and a few more of the best bits from the transcript. (You can snag a cheap Extra Crunch trial here if you need one.)

Oh, and don’t forget to stay up to date on coming chats. There’s still a lot to do.

The full chat

Here’s the full video rewind. Our favorite bits of the transcript follow:

For two months, the people of Hong Kong waited in suspense after China’s legislature approved a new national security law. The legislation’s details were finally made public yesterday and almost immediately went into effect. As many Hong Kong residents feared, the broadly written new law gives Beijing extensive authority over the Special Administrative Region and has the potential to sharply curtail civil liberties.

In response, the United States began the first measures to end the special status it gives to Hong Kong, with the Commerce and State Departments suspending export license exceptions for sensitive U.S. technology and blocking the export of defense equipment.

Much remains uncertain. Hong Kong had also previously enjoyed many freedoms that do not exist in mainland China, under the “one country, two systems” principle put into place after the United Kingdom returned control to China. After announcing the new policies, the U.S. government said further restrictions are being considered. Under special status, Hong Kong had privileges including lower trade tariffs and a separate customs and immigration designation from mainland China, but now the future of those is unclear.

Equally opaque is how the erosion of special status and the new national security law will impact Hong Kong’s startups in the future. In conversations with TechCrunch, investors and founders said they believe the region’s ecosystem is resilient, partly because many companies offer online services — especially financial services — and have already established operations in other markets. But they are also keeping an eye on further developments and preparing for the possibility that key talent will want to relocate to other countries.

Luckin Coffee’s drips and drops of news the past few weeks — including a boardroom feud that is pitting the company’s chairman against a special investigation committee looking into an alleged massive fraud — is now turning into a flood.

In a new SEC filing this morning, the company’s Special Committee, which was tasked with investigating claims that the one-time China-based coffee darling overstated its revenues by hundreds of millions of dollars, has returned with its verdict. And the verdict is that the company did indeed inflate revenues by nearly $300 million.

In its filing, the company said “In the course of the Internal Investigation, the Special Committee and its advisors reviewed over 550,000 documents collected from over 60 custodians, interviewed over 60 witnesses, and performed extensive forensic accounting and data analytics testing.”

What it found is that starting around April 2019, or roughly contemporaneous with the IPO of the company on Nasdaq, the company began inflating revenues. According to the company’s analysis, revenues were overstated by $35 million in Q2, $99 million in Q3, and almost $166 million in Q4, in present day U.S. dollars.

The fraud was first discovered by unknown private investigators in a report that was later circulated online by the short-seller Muddy Waters in January of this year. That short-seller report eventually led the company to begin an investigation roughly three months ago, which led to today’s conclusions.

The filing further stated that “Following the Special Committee’s recommendations, the Board terminated its former Chief Executive Officer and former Chief Operating Officer based on evidence demonstrating their participation in the fabricated transactions.” That news was released a few weeks ago.

Now, this is where things get interesting because this week, the boardroom feud is spilling out into the open. There are competing proposals on who will run Luckin going forward, with the chairman of the board attempting to fire the board’s Special Committee, while the rest of the board is trying to fire the chairman. Yes, it’s complicated, but the vote is happening this week, with the firing of the chairman for July 2, and the firing of the rest of the board in a shareholders meeting on July 5.

We’ll be following those developments closely, but I will say this: whoever read 550,000 pages of evidence in roughly three months deserves … at least $300 million in Luckin Coffee free coupons. I’d even say it’s even grounds for a permanent and free coffee subscription. Let’s just hope the board spills even more beans on what is going on here. (Okay, I am going to stop now).

The United States government began measures today to end its special status with Hong Kong, one month after Secretary of State Michael Pompeo told Congress that Hong Kong should no longer be considered autonomous from China. These include suspending export license exceptions for sensitive U.S. technology and ending the export of defense equipment to Hong Kong. Both the Commerce and State Departments also said further restrictions are being evaluated.

The U.S. government’s announcements were made a few hours before news broke that China had passed a new national security law that will give it greater control over Hong Kong. It is expected to take effect on July 1, according to the South China Morning Post.

The term “special status” refers to arrangements that recognized the difference between Hong Kong and mainland China under the “one country, two systems” policy put into place when the United Kingdom handed control of Hong Kong back to Beijing in 1997. These included different export controls, immigration policies and lower tariffs. But that preferential treatment was put into jeopardy after China proposed the new national security law, which many Hong Kong residents fear will end the region’s judicial independence from Beijing.

The U.S Commerce Department and State Department issued separate statements today detailing the new restrictions on Hong Kong. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross said the Commerce Department will suspend export license exceptions for sensitive U.S. technology, and that “further actions to eliminate differential treatment are also being evaluated.”

The State Department said that it will end exports of U.S. defense equipment and also “take steps toward imposing the same restrictions on U.S. defense and dual-use technologies to Hong Kong as it does for China.”

In a statement to Reuters, Kurt Tong, a former U.S. consul general in Hong Kong, said that the U.S. government’s decisions today would not impact a large amount of trade between the U.S. and Hong Kong because the territory is not a major manufacturing center and its economy is mostly services.

According to figures from the Office of the United States Trade Representative, Hong Kong accounted for 2.2% of overall U.S. exports in 2018, totaling $37.3 billion, with the top export categories being electrical machinery, precious metal and stones, art and antiques, and beef. But the new restrictions could make more difficult for U.S. semiconductor and other technology companies to do business with Hong Kong clients.

Other restrictions proposed by the United States including ending its extradition treaty with Hong Kong.

Both the State and Commerce departments said that the restrictions were put into place for national security reasons. “We can no longer distinguish between the export of controlled items to Hong Kong or to mainland China,” Pompeo wrote. “We cannot risk these items falling into the hands of the People’s Liberation Army, whose primary purpose is to uphold the dictatorship of the CCP by any means necessary.”

In his statement, Ross said, “With the Chinese Communist Party’s imposition of new security measures on Hong Kong, the risk that sensitive U.S. technology will be diverted to the People’s Liberation Army or Ministry of State Security has increased, all while undermining the territory’s autonomy.”

Sometimes you can’t just get a [L]uckin’ break.

After announcing this morning that it is ending its fight to stay listed on Nasdaq, China-based coffee chain and delivery company Luckin Coffee announced that it is requiring that its chairman, Lu Zhengyao, resign in a filing with the SEC.

It also announced in its SEC filing that the chairman has requested the firing of independent director Sean Shao through a shareholders resolution, which will be voted upon at a shareholders meeting to be held on Sunday, July 5th.

My god.

It’s getting ugly at Luckin, which is struggling to turnaround in the aftermath of revelations of a $300 million accounting fraud that has seen its stock price plummet in recent months. Shao has been leading the board’s independent investigation over the accounting irregularity.

Now, at a shareholders meeting, the board will be up for grabs, with investors in the company (yes, there are still investors!) choosing who to keep and who to fire in a devolving case of corporate governance run amok.

In addition to voting on several current directors of the company, shareholders will also vote on installing two new independent directors, Zeng Ying and Yang Jie, who have long-time business and legal backgrounds.

We had previously known about the extraordinary shareholders meeting, but now the company has upped the ante, by voting to force out the chairman by July 2 — three days before the shareholders meeting is scheduled to take place.

Honestly, at this point, it’s impossible to say what comes next. But what I can say is that Luckin is currently trading down 54% at close this Friday, and is worth barely a few hundred million dollars — down from its peak market cap of over $12 billion. Wh ever wins is going to own some truly empty cups.

For decades, the United States has had a monopoly on positioning, navigation, and timing technology with its Global Positioning System (GPS), a constellation of satellites operated by the military that today provides the backbone for location on billion of devices worldwide.

As those technologies have become not just key to military maneuvers but the very foundation of modern economies, more and more governments around the world have sought ways to decouple from usage of the U.S.-centric system. Russia, Japan, India, the United Kingdom and the European Union have all made forays to build out alternatives to GPS, or at least, to augment the system with additional satellites for better coverage.

Few countries though have made the investment that China has made into its Beidou (北斗) GPS alternative. Over twenty years, the country has spent billions of dollars and launched nearly three dozen satellites to create a completely separate system for positioning. According to Chinese state media, nearly 70% of all Chinese handsets are capable of processing signals from Beidou satellites.

Now, the final puzzle piece is in place, as the last satellite in the Beidou constellation was launched Tuesday morning into orbit, according to the People’s Daily.

It’s just another note in the continuing decoupling of the United States and China, where relations have deteriorated over differences of market access and human rights. Trade talks between the two countries have reached a standstill, with one senior Trump administration advisor calling them off entirely. The announcement of a pause in new issuances of H-1B visas is also telling, as China is the source of the second largest number of petitions according to USCIS, the country’s immigration agency.

While the completion of the current plan for Beidou offers Beijing new flexibility and resiliency for this critical technology, ultimately, positioning technologies are mostly not adversarial — additional satellites can offer more redundancy to all users, and many of these technologies have the potential to coordinate with each other, offering more flexibility to handset manufacturers.

Nonetheless, GPS spoofing and general hacking of positioning technologies remains a serious threat. Earlier this year, the Trump administration published a new executive order that would force government agencies to develop more robust tools to ensure that GPS signals are protected from hacking.

Given how much of global logistics and our daily lives are controlled by these technologies, further international cooperation around protecting these vital assets seems necessary. Now that China has its own fully-working system, they have an incentive to protect their own infrastructure as much as the United States does to continue to provide GPS and positioning more broadly to the highest standards of reliability.

Qupital, a trade financing platform, announced today that it will partner with eBay as one of its officially recommended Hong Kong financing service providers. In today’s announcement, Qupital said it will provide offshore financing services, including working capital, to eBay sellers in China through QiaoYiDai, its main product.

The agreement with eBay means Qupital will be able to monitor the real-time data of eBay sellers who apply for their services, which the fintech startup says will enable it to assess credit applications within three days, on average, and settle drawdown requests in less than a day.

Founded in 2016 and based in Hong Kong, Qupital raised a $15 million Series A last year led by strategic investor CreditEase FinTech Investment Fund, with participation from Alibaba Hong Kong Entrepreneurs Fund and MindWorks Ventures.

Qupital is one of a growing roster of fintech companies in Asia—Aspire and First Circle are a couple other examples—that provide loans, credit lines and services to online sellers, SMBs and other businesses who often have trouble obtaining working capital from traditional lenders like banks.

Instead of relying on financial statements, these companies use data analytics to assess creditworthiness. In QiaoYiDai’s case, this means looking at “e-commerce statistics and big data, including the credibility of [applicants’] online shops, historical transaction data, rating data, refund and exchange rates of goods, among a plethora of other data points,” Qupital said in its announcement.

On average, Qiaoyidai provides an average credit limit of $150,000, with a maximum credit line of up to $1.5 million for qualifying sellers.

More e-commerce vendors in China are turning to social media as their main channels for reaching buyers (for example, Alibaba has partnerships with Weibo and Douyin and rival JD.com recently struck a strategic partnership with Kuaishou, while TikTok began testing social commerce last year), and having quick, integrated access to financing tools may convince vendors to stick with legacy e-commerce platforms like eBay, especially for cross-border sellers.

Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com’s shares rose 5.7% after opening at HKD $239 (about USD $30.80) during their first day of trading on the Hong Kong stock exchange. JD.com had originally priced the shares for the secondary offering at $226.

JD.com issued 133 million new Class A ordinary shares as part of the secondary offering and said it expects its net proceeds to be about HKD 30.05 billion (or about $3.9 billion). Funds raised from the offering will be used to develop JD.com’s supply chain technology. The secondary offering’s underwriter can also opt to issue up to an additional 19.95 million new Class A ordinary shares if there is demand, for 30 days after June 11.

JD.com held its initial public offering on Nasdaq in 2015. JD.com’s U.S. shares closed up 1.7% in Wednesday trading.

JD.com said its online sales increased during the coronavirus lockdowns in China earlier this year. During the first quarter of 2020, revenue grew 20.7% year over year.

The firm is undergoing a gradual leadership change, with retail head Xu Lei taking over responsibilities from founder and CEO Richard Liu, who was arrested two years ago in Minnesota on suspicion of rape. Though Liu was not charged, his accuser filed a lawsuit against him last year, which is still ongoing.

It is the third Chinese tech firm to hold a secondary offering on the Hong Kong stock exchange, after Alibaba last November and Netease earlier this month.

Several U.S.-listed Chinese companies listed are eyeing the Hong Kong stock market because Congress is currently considering a bill that would require foreign companies to follow U.S. auditing standards and financial regulations, and reveal if they are owned or controlled by a foreign government.

While the bill would apply to all overseas companies, it is targeted at China as part of the U.S.-China trade war, and could potentially force some to delist. Mainland Chinese companies listed in the United States are also under heavier scrutiny after Luckin Coffee was found to have overstated is sales by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Akron, Ohio, the hometown of LeBron James and the seat of the US tire industry; the one hundred and twenty seventh largest city in the US; and the home of America’s first toy company is now the latest site of a global experiment in whether cities can use behavioral economics to help foster good citizenship.

Thanks to the work of the city’s deputy mayor for integrated development, James Hardy, Akron is the first city to roll out services from an Israeli-based company called Colu. A startup backed by just over $20 million in financing from American and Israeli investors, the company has developed an app-based rewards service that cities can roll out to provide perks to users.

In Akron’s case, the initiative rewards points for shopping at local businesses that can be redeemed for discounts at those stores. The initial effort, which includes a platform for businesses to market directly to the app’s users, focuses on businesses owned by women and minorities (a response to the movement for racial justice that has sprung up in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis).

Akron is the first city of what Colu founder Amos Meiri expects to be a nationwide rollout throughout the US. The company already has managed to ink another agreement with the city of Chula Vista, Calif.

Colu, which has raised its capital from investors associated with blockchain technologies like Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group; the Boston-based venture capital firm, Spark Capital; New York’s Box Group and the Israeli corporate conglomerate, IDB Group, has deep ties to the cryptocurrency world of alternative financial instruments through Meiri.

One of the original architects of the Ethereum protocol, Meiri’s work with Colu is in some ways an extension of that effort to create new kinds of economies powered by alternative financial mechanisms.

Meiri said cities typically pay for Colu out of their marketing budgets as a new way to communicate and attempt to influence civic behavior.

For Akron’s government officials, the company’s services are a way to boost locally owned businesses that have been hit hard by the state’s attempts to contain the COVID-19 outbreak.

“Our locally owned small businesses are facing enormous challenges and we need out-of-the-box ideas that safely connect them to consumers and turn local spending into a source of pride for residents,” said Akron Mayor Dan Horrigan, in a statement. “Our partnership with Colu will enable the city to reward customers for shopping local, improving revenues for our small businesses while helping folks stretch their dollars.”

Earlier work with the municipal government in Tel Aviv promoted sustainable business practice and encouraged businesses to do more to manage their waste and carbon footprint by introducing a “green label”. Businesses that followed the city’s guidelines were given the label and shoppers were encouraged to frequent those merchants.

Colu envisions itself as more than just a marketing and rewards platform for businesses. The company hopes it can draw users into a kind of social networking platform for civic engagement where users can share their own stories about city-life and their interactions with local business owners and the community.

In some ways, it’s a kinder, gentler version of China’s social credit scoring system, which is also designed to influence civic behavior. In this formulation, there’s a rewards system, but no mechanisms to punish citizens for bad behavior.

“Akron has a long history of innovation within our economy — this initiative draws on that legacy,” said Deputy Mayor Hardy, in a statement. “By putting the future of Akron’s locally owned small businesses in the palm of our citizens’ hands, we hope to make it easy for consumers to keep their money local and continue to strengthen our incredible community.”

Platforms still aren’t doing enough to tackle disinformation related to the coronavirus crisis, the European Commission said today.

In a Communication it is pressing tech platforms to produce monthly reports about their efforts in this area, asking for more detailed data on actions being taken to promote authoritative content; improve users’ awareness; and limit coronavirus disinformation and advertising related to it.

It also wants to see increased cooperation from platforms towards researchers, and fact-checkers in all EU Members States (for all languages), along with increased transparency around the implementation of policies to inform users in instances where they interact with disinformation. 

In recent years the Commission has pressed platforms for action to tackle misinformation — signing up tech giants and adtech players to a voluntary Code of Practice on disinformation focused on disrupting ad revenues and empowering reporting of fakes.

Since then, its assessment of platforms’ efforts to tackle malicious fakes has been lukewarm to say the least, with repeat calls for them to do more. It has also repeatedly called out a problematic ongoing lack of transparency related to these self regulatory efforts.

The coronavirus crisis has further amped up political pressure on platforms over their handling of online disinformation — and tech giants such as Google have responded with some measures aimed at pro-actively surfacing authoritative health information alongside coronavirus content (initially focused on the US, in its case).

Back in April, Facebook also said it would alert users who have interacted with certain types of coronavirus misinformation — displaying a debunking pop-up with messaging from the World Health Organization.

However the Commission said today that it wants to see more evidence that such measures are working.

EU lawmakers are also in the process of drafting new rules for digital services and platforms that could redrawn the line of liability and heap new responsibilities on tech businesses related to the content they host. A draft of this incoming Digital Services Act (DSA) is slated by the end of the year, after a public consultation kicked off last week.

“The coronavirus pandemic has been accompanied by a massive ‘infodemic’,” commissioner Josep Borrell said at a press briefing today. “We have witnessed a wave of false and misleading information, hoaxes and conspiracy theories, as well as targeted influence operations by foreign actors.”

Borrell gave examples of disinformation that risks public health which the Commission has seen spreading online in Europe such as bogus claims that drinking bleach can cure the coronavirus or that washing hands does not help.

He also pointed to vandalism of 5G infrastructure being fuelled by COVID-19 conspiracy theories.

“Some of this is aimed at harming the European Union and its Member States, trying to undermine our democracies, the credibility of the European Union and of national authorities,” he added. “What is more, disinformation in times of the coronavirus can kill. Misleading health information, consumer fraud, cyber crime or targeted disinformation campaigns by foreign actors pose several potential risks to our citizens, their health, to their trust in public institutions.”

Commenting in a statement, the Commission’s VP for values and transparency, Věra Jourová, added: “Disinformation waves have hit Europe during the Coronavirus pandemic. They originated from within as well as outside the EU. To fight disinformation, we need to mobilise all relevant players from online platforms to public authorities, and support independent fact checkers and media. While online platforms have taken positive steps during the pandemic, they need to step up their efforts. Our actions are strongly embedded in fundamental rights, in particular freedom of expression and information.”

“I believe that the fact that worked with the platforms and we designed with them the Code of Practice on disinformation helped to roll out new policies quicker,” she said, discussing coronavirus disinformation and what more platforms need to do, during a press briefing.

“Again platforms need to do more and our Code was just the first step. There is room for improvement. For instance we know only as much as platforms tell us — this is not good enough. They have to open up and offer more evidence that the measures they have taken are working well. They also have to enable the public to identify new threats independently. We invite them now to provide monthly reports with more granular information than ever before.”

Removing financial incentives for those who seek to benefit from disinformation is “crucial”, per Jourová, who said the Commission is taking steps to “gain a better understanding of the flow of advertising revenues linked to disinformation”. 

“We need to ensure transparency and accountability,” she added. “Citizens need to know how information is reaching them and where it comes from.”

Jourová announced that TikTok has agreed to join its EU Code of Practice on disinformation — saying she expected it to conclude the formalities “very soon”.

She added that the Commission is also “negotiating” with Facebook -owned WhatsApp about signing up.

She emphasized that EU lawmakers are not asking platforms to take down general disinformation (with some exceptions related to COVID-19; such as where bogus products or advice might cause public harm) — but rather to surface quality, fact-checked information so users are able to get the facts for themselves.

Jourová lauded Twitter’s recent decision to add labels to some of US president Donald Trump’s tweets — citing it as the sort of action it’s looking for from platforms. 

“Twitter is a very good example of what we support,” she said. “Twitter did not remove any declaration of president Trump they just added the facts. And this is what I call plurality and possibility of the competition of free speech. Because we should not rely on just one authoritative declaration when it’s possible to add some facts which might look at it from a different angle. So this is the competition of speeches. 

“We never wanted the platforms to remove the content — unless, and here comes the COVID-related situation — unless it is manifestly and clearly harmful to the health of the people. Which is the case of many strange advices and dangerous advices were published through social media.”

During the press briefing the commissioners were pressed on how little resource the Commission has is putting in to disinformation task forces — with an annual strategic communication budget of only around €5M last year.

Jourová responded by saying that the system of collaboration it’s established to tackle the problem is fed by pooled resources from EU Member States, civic society and the platforms themselves.

“The platforms are investing a lot in creating the task forces, their special units to fulfil the commitments — what we expect from them to do also in this communication — we are engaging civil society and fact checkers, we are engaging the research sector. So you have to speak about much wider field and many other capacities which we are deploying to do that,” she said, adding also that in the COVID disinformation context the health sector is also being engaged to combat junk content. 

“I have always said that the fight against disinformation is not about censorship — it’s not about removing the false claims and removing disinformation and misinformation. Those who are responsible for the subject has to proactively defend their facts, has to proactively bring trustworthy information,” she continued.

While disinformation is not generally considered illegal across the EU (with some exceptions in certain Member States), Jourová argued that fakes “can cause significant harm” — though she also suggestion the Commission will avoid laying down any hard legal lines here, as it works to update digital regulation.

“For the disinformation, our logic will be to look into how big the potential public harm might be,” she said, giving a hint of how it’s looking at the issue in relation to the forthcoming DSA. “I do not foresee that we will come with hard regulation on that. Because it is too sensitive to assess this information and have some rules — it is playing with the freedom of speech and I really want to come with a balanced proposal. So in DSA you will see the regulatory action very probably against illegal content — because what’s illegal offline must be clearly illegal online and the platforms have to proactively work in this direction. But for disinformation we will have to consider the efficient way how to decrease the harmful impact of disinformation.

“We will focus on its impact before elections, because we see that disinformation — well targeted and designed — can do harm to the free and fair elections. So these are very serious issues we will have to cover.”

Jourová warned that the next health-related disinformation battleground in Europe will be vaccination.

She also named China and Russia as foreign entities that the Commission has confirmed as being behind state-backed disinformation campaigns targeting the region.

Alarm has been rising in Washington over the extent of Chinese influence in the U.S., with particular focus on universities and their research as well as on concerns around China’s acquisition of critical U.S. technologies that it needs in sectors as diverse as semiconductors and aeronautics.

Now, a new bipartisan investigatory report from the Senate urges even further action, this time in monitoring and potentially outright blocking Chinese telecommunications companies from accessing the American market.

Released this morning by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the report makes a range of recommendations, including pushing the Trump administration to take a more active role in monitoring Chinese telecom companies like China Unicom and ComNet and also pushing Congress to put more resources and legal heft behind regulations designed to monitor the national security implications of these companies.

At the heart of the investigation, which has gone on for more than a year, is the work of Team Telecom, what we have called here at TechCrunch a “shadowy” informal committee between the departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Defense that works in conjunction with the FCC to review national security issues within the FCC’s work.

Among its open-ended responsibilities, Team Telecom has focused on reviewing applications for telecom operating licenses by foreign operators as well as opening up new underwater cables for internet traffic, including a key pipe between the U.S. and Asia partially funded by Google and Facebook.

The Trump administration, aligned with reducing Chinese telecom operations in the U.S. and perhaps hearing word of the Senate’s investigation, had previously announced in April a formalization of the process for reviewing the national security implications of telecom licensing that would expand Team Telecom’s authority and bring more transparency.

The Senate’s report notes that executive order, but says it does not go far enough, demanding that the rules be expanded to continually monitor companies receiving licenses. At this time, “Team Telecom” or what is now known as the “Committee for the Assessment of Foreign Participation in the United States Telecommunications Services Sector” (I’ve dubbed it CAFPUSTSS but that is really hard to type) only reviews applications once at the time of submission and never follows up. From the report:

Team Telecom entered into a security agreement with China Telecom Americas in 2007 and ComNet in 2009. Since entering into the agreements more than ten years ago, Team Telecom conducted only two site visits to each company—or four in total. Only one of those visits occurred before 2017.

In its recommendations, the Senate’s report pushes for continual monitoring of foreign telecom operators so that any changes in its operations would be caught by U.S. investigators.

In addition to expanding the statutory authority of Team Telecom’s new committee, the report also urges more resources be appropriated to fund its work. The report castigated the paltry resources currently assigned to these investigations, noting that “[the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security] historically dedicated fewer than five employees to reviewing applications and monitoring compliance with security agreements.“

This most recent report is part of a long line of studies made by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on China, including investigating the country’s Confucius Institutes at American universities, talent recruitment plans such as China’s Thousand Talents Plan, and Chinese cyberattacks on American infrastructure.

The bipartisan nature of the report shows the growing concern among both parties about Chinese influence in the United States, and the increased inter-party cooperation to unify against the country’s perceived threats. Late last month, a bipartisan Senate bill was introduced to eliminate Hong Kong’s special trading status with the U.S. as punishment for China’s passage of a new national security law that critics fear will chill free speech and freedom for the semi-autonomous city.

In a closely-watched decision today, the Supreme Court of British Columbia published a key decision in the extradition case of Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of Huawei Technologies, China’s largest telecommunications company and a frequent target of U.S. policymakers.

In its ruling, the court said that the case met the standard for “double criminality,” and thus the extradition hearing will be allowed to continue. That decision represents a major blow to Huawei, which had hoped to end the suit and bring Meng home back to China.

It’s a pivotal moment in the long-running saga over the fate of Meng and Huawei itself. She was arrested at Vancouver International Airport on December 1, 2018 at the request of U.S. authorities, who eventually indicted her and Huawei itself with a bevy of fraud charges.

Those charges stemmed from an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice looking into Huawei’s ties with a number of affiliates including Skycom Tech Co Ltd, which is alleged to have sold telecommunications equipment to Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions. Huawei uses American technology in its products, and under U.S. export laws, companies are forbidden from transferring that technology to countries under sanction. Huawei has previously denied that it controlled the companies, and has vigorously defended itself in the case.

Meng has been under house arrest in Vancouver for almost a year and a half pending deliberations of the Canadian courts. The case has seen intense scrutiny from China, the U.S. and Canadian authorities, and has become a symbol of the continuing trade fight between the U.S. and China.

Today’s decision comes from a narrowly focused court hearing in January on a Canadian legal doctrine known as “double criminality,” which states that a subject needs to face criminal charges in both Canada and the receiving country in order for an extradition to be approved. While courts generally handle all aspects of extradition at once, the judge in this case, associate chief justice Heather Holmes, decided to split Meng’s extradition hearing into phases, given that without double criminality, the case would be automatically closed.

VANCOUVER, BC – JANUARY 20: Huawei Technologies Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou is escorted by her security personnel as she leaves court during a break for lunch on the first day of her extradition trial on January 20, 2020 in Vancouver, Canada. (Photo by Jeff Vinnick/Getty Images)

The decision on Meng, who is the daughter of Huawei’s founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei, is just one of many different battles that Huawei has faced in recent months.

Over the weekend, the company faced a new blow to its prospects in the West after the United Kingdom, which had been a lukewarm but steady supporter of using Huawei’s equipment in its next-generation 5G networks, announced that it was reversing its decision and would wean itself off of Huawei equipment over the coming years.

Meanwhile in the U.S., the Trump administration has focused intently on the company as it attempts to shift the balance of power in the United States’ trade relations with China. Two weeks ago, the Trump administration extended its technology export restrictions on Huawei, endangering the company’s ability to product its chips and smartphones. TSMC, the world’s largest contract semiconductor fab, said that it wasn’t accepting new orders from Huawei in light of the new restrictions. At the same time, TSMC announced a massive, $12 billion manufacturing facility in Arizona.

While the Trump administration has made economic combat with Huawei a policy priority, that strategy has not been endorsed by the entire federal government, with departments and agencies like the Department of Defense worried that the restrictions on export licenses could ultimately have deleterious, second-order effects on American industrial competitiveness.

Indeed, given the continuing situation with the U.S., Huawei itself has said that one of its most important missions is to build its equipment using entirely domestic Chinese components, veering around U.S. export controls and breaking free of their confines. Assisting on that front is China’s government itself, which has put up billions of dollars in new funding to build up its domestic chipmaking capabilities.

It’s a complex situation, and one that Western policymakers have struggled to come to a unified approach on. As our writer Scott Bade described a few weeks ago, countries like Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States are struggling to come to agreement on Huawei and China’s tech forays more generally, with each country approaching the issue from its own point-of-view and from different levels of engagement with the Chinese mainland.

While the Meng case is just the latest salvo in the on-going battle here, expect more skirmishes ahead.